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Entries tagged as ‘nextnewsroom’

Newspapers as a local information utility?

April 4, 2008 · No Comments

Many newspapers treated the Web as a fad or “add-on” when it came along. Now it’s “web first, print second.”

The speakers here at the Next Newsroom conference seem to suggest that traditional media are missing the boat again by failing to host and nurture social media networks and other useful online applications. Can newspapers become the “local information connection utility”?

Rusty Coats, director of strategic initiatives at Media General, says that new business models suggest 60% of the content in the future will be generated by staff and 40% by non-staff, i.e. users of the Web site.

“The most important thing we can bring is the field of data,” Coats says, such as local crime and real-estate data. In addition to data, journalism organizations can play the role of being a community facilitator or aggregator of other media content.

It’s a natural evolution, from Coats’ perspective. During the first phase, news web sites sought to be the main portal for information in their communities. In the second phase, news web sites learned they needed to optimize their stories to draw traffic from Google. And now we’re in the third phase, in which news web sites are trying to draw traffic through widgets in Facebook and other social networking platforms, he said.

Is that a sustainable business model? “I don’t know what is a sustainable business model in the next three to five years,” Coats said.

Rob Barrett, of latimes.com, says his website is trying to create a community conversation model (sounds like civic journalism to me) in which the newspaper hosts online conversations, facilitated by reporters, that include activists, policymakers, and people on the front lines of the debate (teachers, doctors, etc.).  “It’s a much more efficient way of finding out what people are concerned about,” Barrett said.

This new model requires an investment in selecting informed, thoughtful participants and moderating the conversation. Start-ups that seek solely to aggregate comments from the community can implode from a lack of management, he said. In the coming weeks, his website plans to launch a site with 800 neighborhood pages on it, integrating content from LATimes.com, community blogs and some of the features found on sites like Citysearch.com.

As one of the panelists put it: “Daddy smells page views.”

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New spaces to play in

April 4, 2008 · 1 Comment

Maybe we need to bulldoze our newsrooms and start with a fresh design.

NEW MINDSETS = NEW WORKSPACES

The newsrooms of the future need to be integrated, innovative, collaborative, adaptable and transparent, said Next Newsroom project manager Chris O’Brien. “It will become increasingly difficult to define where the newsroom ends,” O’Brien said.

State-of-the-art newsrooms have adaptable, plug-and-play workspaces (think IKEA) and open meeting spaces to engage with the public, say Saf Fahim of Archronica Architects and Randy Covington, director of the IFRA Newsplex at the University of South Carolina. IFRA is a consortium of newspapers with 3,000 members in 70 different countries.

News media companies in Europe and Asia are far ahead of their counterparts in North America in redesigning their workplaces to reflect the shift away from being a gatekeeper.

Fahim began working with the Associated Press in 1993 on restructuring its workflow and newsroom to prepare the organization for the paradigm shift that had begun. One of the first things to go: Reporters having a fixed, personal cubicle. “There is no reason fundamentally, we found, you should be sitting in one particular cubicle or one particular office,” Fahim said.

The biggest lesson Fahim said he learned from working with newsrooms is that the transformation can’t happen unless there’s a training facility, a school of some sort, attached to the newsroom that provides a space for journalists to learn the new technology in a safe environment.

The role of the newsroom librarian should be more important, not less, in the state-of-the-art newsroom. So-called “cybrarians” apply journalistic judgment and provide data and context to audio and video collected by “backpack journalists” in the field, Covington said. “The news librarians tend to be going away, and that’s a tragedy because we need them more than we ever did,” Covington said. “Google’s great, but it’s not good enough.”

In addition to a cybrarian, the newsroom of the future will have journalists cross-trained to tell stories across video, audio and print media (”backpack journalists”) and “story builders” who focus on the user experience of a story. What does this mean? “Get me rewrite!” The story builder is like a desk editor who works with reporters and manages the production of stories, someone who understands the media formats well enough to develop and deploy packages across different media streams.

Covington uses the Shelby Star of Shelby, N.C., as an example of a small newsroom taking advantage of technology to keep their website relevant. The “Star Car” has a high-powered cell phone antenna mounted on its roof that lets mojos transmit pictures and video straight to the website from the field. “Every day they are doing what everybody says they wish they could be doing,” Covington said.

On the other end of the spectrum, The London Telegraph also reinvented its newsroom. It starts with a central hub (like the Super Desk) with 11 spokes (or news desks) spreading out. All of a story’s components are discussed from the beginning at the central hub (or huddle, if you will). Instead of having numerous titles, at the Telegraph you’re a reporter, editor or producer, Covington said.

If they can collect video and audio, newspapers are well positioned to dominate news media, Covington said. “I don’t think the broadcasters see the train that’s about to run over them,” he said.

Here are excerpts from Covington’s talk. You see it either on YouTube or Vimeo. It’s a simple audio slideshow.

http://www.vimeo.com/874286

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From the Next Newsroom conference…

April 3, 2008 · No Comments

The Knight Foundation’s Gary Kebbel announced this morning that they’ve been so impressed with the Next Newsroom online platform that Chris O’Brien, the project manager, is invited to share it with the journalism universe at the UNITY conference in Chicago this summer.

Way to go, Chris!

Lots of great ideas and insights bubbling here. More to come.

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I’m off to help create the Next Newsroom

April 2, 2008 · No Comments

I’ll be spending the next few days in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., participating in the Next Newsroom conference, which is sponsored by the Knight Foundation.

I hope to blog live from the conference, something I’ve never done before. There also will be a live webstream on Thursday.

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll find someone who will support my idea of producing a short documentary on this crossroads that confronts newspaper journalists. We’re witnessing a historic shift on multiple levels, and the human dimension of this drama — journalists coping with the obliteration their jobs, profession and their role in a democracy itself — deserves to be told. Feel free to check out a 3-minute documentary I recently made about the demise of an old brewery here in Seattle: Go to my other blog, Viva Media!

Vanity Fair has published a story about The New York Times and speculation about the Sulzberger family being bullied into selling it. I haven’t had a chance to digest it fully, but a few sentences worth highlighting off the bat:

The New York Times Company is currently worth just a bit less than $2.8 billion, down from almost $7 billion in 2002. There’s little to indicate that the steady decline in its value will slow—it hasn’t implemented radical cost-cutting, made concerted efforts to shed underperforming assets, or proposed any new business strategies (save for its 12-year Internet effort).

The Times, the world’s most influential newspaper, is worth less than $2.8 billion??

It’s laughable but sadly true. By comparison, the nation’s largest garbage hauling and recycling company, Waste Management Inc., is valued today at over $17 billion.

Profit margins at the Times are low compared to other large papers, which Wall Street investors don’t like.

The Times itself, reporting on its recent decision (coming not long after Harbinger and Firebrand announced their directors slate) to cut 100 of its 1,332 news employees, points out that its newspaper operations had an 8 percent operating profit in 2007, while other, comparable papers had 13 to 22 percent margins. Reasonably, the Times share price might start to rise if it, too, could realize such levels of return. But those more profitable papers achieved their results by reducing newsroom personnel by, in some cases, more than 20 percent.

The Vanity Fair article closes with a chilling prediction: That the Times will be sold by the Sulzberger family. Warren Buffett, the Washington Post Co., Michael Bloomberg are trotted out as potential buyers. The highest bidder may win the day, Wolff writes.

The Sulzberger family has long assumed that its virtue and voting control and the weight of history are more powerful than anybody else’s cunning and cash and the ups and downs of the market. No doubt they’ll continue to assume that they have meritoriously protected the paper even after their cluelessness has delivered it into other hands.

I’m sure these rumors will grow louder as the year wears on. Do you think the Times would be better off if the family sold it? If so, under whose ownership?

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